'Voice of Customer' Research

Optimising the sales strategy and identifying specific sales opportunities

The Customer

IT hardware, software and services supplier to the Telecommunications industry.

The Challenge

Our client’s most important telecommunications customer was changing the way it bought IT solutions:

  • Moving from hardware and software procurement to services-based strategic relationships;

  • Moving from technical/procurement functions making decisions about IT to commercial functions increasingly driving IT investment;

  • Moving from a decentralised organisation structure, with discrete OpCo budgets, to a global model with centralised budgeting.

Our client needed to understand the implications of these changes for account planning and execution: What IT solutions should be sold? How should IT solutions be sold and delivered? Where do sales opportunities lie? Which executives should be engaged and what does the engagement model look like?

The Solution

STL conducted face-to-face interviews with a select group of senior executives across the telecoms operators’ business. Interviews covered commercial and technical functions in five countries covering two continents.

STL Advantage

STL’s VOC research was different to customer or market studies that our client had previously used which had focused retrospectively on performance and customer satisfaction. STL’s VOC research focused on future opportunities. It gave concrete steps for how our client could move from being perceived by its customer as an IT vendor to being a true strategic partner. Although of strategic importance, VOC was not theoretical because, whilst it covered strategic issues (solution portfolio, sales strategy), it was also a pre-sales activity that educated the operator about our client’s offerings and assets and identified tangible sales opportunities.

STL fed the findings and recommendations back to the client and worked with it collaboratively to identify and agree an implementation plan for realising the new opportunities.

The Result

After the VOC research, the client had a clear understanding of what IT services its customer required, how IT services should be sold and delivered, and who was making investment decisions. The research identified more than $500m of potential new revenue for our client – revenue that did not appear on any existing sales pipeline.

STL is currently working with the client to execute the implementation plan and is in particular focusing on realising the new sales opportunities that were uncovered by the VOC research.